How To Create a Mission Statement For Your Company
Creating a mission statement can be a daunting process. How do you communicate in just a few words everything that your company does, who you are, and what you want to achieve?
While this process can be overwhelming, if you follow a few key steps, whittling down all of your ideas into just the essentials is easier than you think.
What is a Mission Statement?
A mission statement is a document (physical or digital) that your team creates to give a clear outline of who you are as a company or organization. Your mission statement should define what your company stands for and why you are in business. In essence, it encapsulates the reason your company exists!
Depending on the content that needs to be included, your mission statement can be a long or short document, however, it shouldn’t be overly long and drawn out.
Make sure to give essential information when you are making a mission statement. It can help people who aren’t familiar with your organization or company get a good picture of you as a whole.
“Your mission statement doesn’t have to look the same as everyone else’s. Figure out what’s important to you and your clients and go from there.” (source)
How to craft your Mission Statement
Creating a clear and concise mission statement is important to an organization. It defines the purpose of that organization, the scope of its operations, and the products and/or services it offers. A mission statement should also define a company’s customer base and its area of operation.
There are a few key questions that you need to answer in order to craft your statement. These questions are meant to make you think hard about your company:
Why are we in business?
Think about the core reason why the business was created. What problems were you trying to solve? Why did you want to create the product you have? Provide the service you do?How would we describe our services/products?
Add any words, phrases, images, etc. that define your products or services. What do they do? What do they look like? What pain points are they trying to solve? How are they different?Who are our customers?
Use this section to define who your customers are both ideally and actually. What types of people purchase your product or service? Who do you want to use your product or service?How do our customers perceive us?
Be honest and really consider how you are perceived by your consumers. Are you an environmentally friendly company? Are you cool? Are you disturbing the status quo? Are you reliable?How do we stand out from the competition?
Think about your main competitors and how you are different. Do you have a clear “why”? Do your products and services do something different? Is your technology better?What are our long-term goals?
Write down all of the long-term hopes and dreams that you have for your company. Where do you see the company being in 5 years? 10 years? What are you ultimately trying to achieve?
Once you have answered these questions, you will have all the information you need to write your Mission Statement.
As your company grows and changes, it’s natural that your core values, your customers, and your business processes will change. Don’t be afraid to change your Mission Statement if you think it needs an update.
How Stormboard’s Mission Statement template can help
Stormboard has a Mission Statement Template that is ideal for any type of business in need of creating a Mission Statement. It provides a basic outline that will help you gather all of the information that you need to determine what your unique statement should include.
The ideas you come up with in this template will work as an outline for the actual document you create, can be contributed to by any member of your team (even the remote ones), and can be returned to again and modified as your business goals grow and change.
Use reports to gather everything together
Once you have filled out your template, you will want to gather all of your ideas together and export them to a document so you can bring everything together to create your mission.
Stormboard has a Reporting feature that instantly exports all of your content into a document of your choice!
After filling out the template, click on the “Reports” button in the bottom menu bar. From there you can choose a type of report, such as a Word Document or PowerPoint presentation in order to show others what you have come up with.
Get Started!
Interested in using Stormboard to create a memorable mission statement? Sign up for a free trial now and learn more about our pricing here.
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